


The Heart is a Sensitive Instrument

by indiachick



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adventure, Animal Transformation, Gen, but it's mostly about hearts and things, demon civil war and stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-28
Updated: 2014-01-28
Packaged: 2018-01-10 09:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1158087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiachick/pseuds/indiachick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone’s been carving out demon hearts and sending them to Crowley. Now normally, Meg wouldn’t give a damn. But when the hearts come with a note meant just for her, it becomes impossible not to get involved in the mess. Stopping this killer will mean enforced blonding, working with the King of Hell, and possibly getting herself blown to smithereens, but hey, it’s hard to ignore a blast from the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heart is a Sensitive Instrument

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the spn_reversbang 2013, with awesome art by cassiopeia7.
> 
> Check out the artpost [here!](http://cassiopeia7.livejournal.com/394434.html)
> 
> All extra notes here. http://indiachick.livejournal.com/27958.html

****

**NOW**

It’s nearly midnight when James Killner pulls into an exit on the I-295.

It’s not much unlike other remote highway exits in this part of the country—an oasis of electric light amidst flat farmland, halogen shine picking out towering billboards, a Subway, a Dairy Queen, couple of motels and gas stations. Fake gunfire booms intermittently from a video game arcade, and one of the parked trucks is blasting a Foreigners song, but otherwise the night is quiet, stars hazy from light pollution. 

Killner takes the off-ramp, cutting the wheel right to steer the car into the parking lot of a gas station, navigating past parked semis and trucks. He cuts the ignition and gets out, and there’s a girl sitting on the concrete base of the pump, reading the _Cosmopolitan._ She’s got a beer and a strand of licorice that she chews on methodically, and she looks up when Killner gets closer.

Her eyes are fully black, no discernable iris or sclera.

“You got a pen?” the demon named Meg Masters says, “I want to take this boyfriend quiz.”

A blur of hands and Killner’s got a gun, pulling her to her feet. He drags one hand through Meg’s blonde hair and wraps his arm tight around her neck, the cold metal muzzle of his gun pressing against the pulse point in her throat. Meg chortles, unimpressed, breathing shallow with her head tilted to the star-freckled sky.

“You gonna pull that trigger, big guy?”

“He wants you alive,” Killner says. A door in the Motel 6 across the lot opens and Killner tenses, but only a moment before he recognizes Townsend. The demon frowns and starts moving towards them.

“Oh, good, it’s a threesome,” Meg winks. She twists free, swings for his head. He ducks, swooping low, and her foot comes up, boot connecting with the side of his skull. Staggering, Killner wraps a leg around her thigh like a gaff hook and they both go down. Meg scrambles, getting halfway up before he drags her down again, shoving her forward and downward so she lands on her back. She grabs his hand, twisting it around so the heart carved into his palm is visible, and for a strange moment all she does is look at it, flushed and breathing hard, while he looks at her.

Meg pants, breathless. “Ah, look at that. Hearts. Romantic.”

Killner rips his hand away, punching her in the face. Spitting blood, she flashes him a grin.

“Gonna be like that, huh?”

“Gonna be like that.”

She punches her leg up, and he deflects, thinking she’s aiming for his balls, but she digs her boot into his thigh and flips him over. She knees his gut hard and lights flash Morse code in his eyes. Killner sees a flash of silver, gone in a second as Townsend grabs her by her hips.

Killner closes his eyes for a second, catching his breath. He opens them again when Townsend screams.

“Took you long enough,” Meg says, and Christ on a cookie, is that a _bird?_ Townsend’s arms are pin wheeling in his sockets, the big man flailing as a big bastard of a blackbird pecks at his eyes. Ropey blood spatters the asphalt, and Meg twists away, plain disdain on her face.

Townsend yells again and then his mouth opens, black smoke pushing out on the swell of a long scream. Killner’s fine with that, he’s blowing this shithole too. Only Meg’s in his face, smirking, dropping something around his neck.

“We’re going to have a little chat. Just you and me and the birdie.”

Killner looks down at the pendant with the Devil’s Trap carved on it. Meg bats away the blackbird that tries to land on her shoulder.

“Watch him, would you, Crowley? I gotta pee.”

She jerks her head towards the restroom in the corner. Killner follows the shape of her until she disappears through the door, unfazed by the reek. Then he twists his head around and looks at the red-eyed bird. It has only one eye. The other is a crooked little crease. It looks back at him, like, _what’s up ninja warrior._ A spiral of hysteria runs up Killner’s spine.

“Are you really? C-Crowley, I mean.”

The bird pecks through his socks in reply.

**_2 MONTHS AGO_ **

**Part One**

White queen. Black queen.

God knows what it means. Crowley doesn’t. Meg certainly doesn’t.

She tells him that the first time he asks. The second time. The third time he comes with a box full of hearts, pinkish-red and heavy with blood in it still, and Meg snorts a laugh.

“Is it Valentine’s Day, you kinky bastard?”

“Trust me, darling, you won’t last that long.”

“Smells like sulfur. Someone been cutting out your boys’ hearts?”

“Another demon. Upstart little bastard, thinks he can topple my throne with a few messages carved on _hearts._ ” Crowley gives her a curious glance, picks a heart out and thrusts it at her face. Unimpressed, Meg stares at the crude little shape scratched on tough muscle.

“Another heart,” she drawls. “Heart on a heart. Code, or theatrics, or a conspiracy theory against the King of Hell?”

“You tell me, sweetheart. Message’s for you.”

Crowley’s found hearts the whole week, he tells her. Hearts in the post. Hearts being delivered by bewildered pizza boys along with the Fellini’s pizza he’d ordered. Hearts stuck to trees. All with the same crude drawing and a cruder note: _white queen, black queen._ And the message’s for _her._ __

“One for the Scooby gang, maybe?” simpers Meg, leaning forward as much as the chains will allow her. “Maybe it’s about the God-rock, you ever think of that?”

She doesn’t think it’s that, for the record. The heart-carving and the modus operandi of cutting hearts out of chest isn’t as unfamiliar to her as she’s letting on either. But it’s not something concrete, not a _memory_ , if you will. Just an undercurrent at the bottom of her consciousness. Little red thread looping around something more tangible, and maybe if she pulls hard enough—

“He says it’s for you. You’ve got your own Annie Oakley then. Congratulations.”

Meg’s been here for months. This dank little room, narrow walls and grimy tiles that were once white; windowless, sunless little cage that she makes her own with fingernail drawings. There’s no bed, just this chair, and even the chair came only this morning, when Crowley apparently remembered her again. If she’s got an Annie Oakley—and please, every scourge on the roads of America’s seen that flick on some late night movie channel or the other—she wishes it were the nukey kind. Set this place on fire and ride into the sunset.  Maybe take the King of Hell’s head as a souvenir.

Meg’s not a fabulist, but she didn’t get so far in life without a good amount of imagination and adaptation.

“ _White queen, black queen_. Ring no bells? No?” Crowley leans closer. “I’ve got ways to make you talk, but I have a policy of not getting my hands dirty if I can help it. But I _will_ make you talk. And it won’t be nice.”

“Talk dirty all you want,” says Meg, smiling. “Just don’t kiss me. Too many years on the crossroads, who knows whereyour mouth’s been?”   

“Cute.” Crowley straightens his suit. Gives her a scientifically interested look. Leaves.

“Don’t untie me or anything, asshole,” Meg mutters, and eyes the hearts he left in the cell. If she could get out of her bonds, maybe she could volley them at Crowley when he comes back. Wouldn’t do much damage but it would be squicky.

She can settle for squicky.

*~~*

When the water closes and the heat rises, Meg thinks of Madame Padva and her House in the Upper Circles of Hell.

It was strange, that building, with its scrap metal porch and fire-blasted awnings, the clicking peepholes that let loose streams of butterflies, the crooked rooms fashioned from ripped-out confessionals.  Built from lost things, things that no one needed anymore. Madame Padva was a curator of the wasted and the lost, kitsch in a way other demons in hell weren’t, garish and tawdry and beautiful. A tiny woman of indistinct European origin, her hands had bathed in enough blood during her time on Earth that they were permanently scarlet. They left bloody prints on everything she touched. _The Scarlet Spitfire,_ some of the patrons of the House called her.

“Oh, I remember her,” says Crowley, cockney accent smudged by a layer of water, ringing clear again when he lets her come up for air. “Ran a saloon and whorehouse. Had a light-bulb in her backyard. The miserable skank. Tell me more.”

Yes, the giant light-bulb in her backyard. Probably a metaphor, who knew. Padva knew well enough about the constellational nature of demons. They were drawn to ugliness and excess, violence and monstrosities. And Padva dressed up her demon-girls in steel and iron, porcelain and nickel, melded skin and flesh with metal. It was a full house every night.

Meg remembers. Her bones hum with memory—older than Lucifer, older than Azazel, older even than Alistair and her apprenticeship under him. She grits her teeth against it, flexes wrists against the cuffs keeping her in the bathtub. She sputters on holy water. Heat threads through her teeth. Her breaths are a series of jagged glottal stops that never become words. She gasps and her body arches under the water, trying to get free.

 

Meg remembers. Gaslight glow and sweat on her belly, the oily aroma of Padva’s dripping candles, and her eyes weren’t fully black yet, oh no—

 “And blah, blah. And then you got bored, and you jumped ship to Alistair instead.”

Meg spits water, feels like black oil is pooling in her chest. “What—you want—the Cliff Notes version— of the greatest hits?”

Crowley looks a bit like a boiling lobster. Hell is hot, and what was once middle management just doesn’t have the tough skin for it. Give him a few more decades and he’d probably turn the place into apartment condos. Real-estate is the shit these days and Crowley’s an opportunist if there ever was one.

“Trust me, it’s hard to get you lot to remember anything more than the last time someone jumped your bones. Scientific, this technique,” Crowley waves expansively, meaning Meg, and the steam, and the tub, “You give anyone enough symbolism, and the floodgates open.”

Meg smirks for him, slow like she’s enjoying a summer swim, rolling her head on her shoulder, sighing when her spine cracks and pops.  He knows it’s no picnic in here, though. Where water meets bare skin, she sizzles. She eyes the crucifixes floating in the water, the plastic beads that tangle on her toes. Steam throws shimmering rainbows that shatter in the bright fluorescence of Crowley’s little torture chamber.

 “I’m trying to conduct an investigation, actually. But you insist on non-cooperation.”

 Holy water to her chin now, and Meg laughs, feels her voice roll away from her. Some water gets in her mouth and she chokes, blood bubbling in her throat, her words a loose, tongueless gasp of air, “I don’t know the answer to your riddle. What do you want me to say?”

Crowley straightens his tie. He smells faintly of goats, though she can’t really be sure with the water corroding her senses. He looks flustered, fly in his ointment and all that shit. Meg couldn’t care less _about_ him, but his renewed interest in her makes her curious. It’s been a while since Dick Roman, and Meg’s spent most of her captivity scratching unicorn shapes into narrow cell walls. But now here’s Crowley, a mystery about hearts, and it’s all sparkles and torture again. She could jump for joy.

Meg spits at him. The water sizzles against his cheek, birthing a trail of steam that tries to clamber up his nostril.

“I don’t have time for this. Behave, or I’ll burn you, darling. Ash to ash, dust to dust. You’ll be nothing more than soot on the sole of my boot.”

Meg smiles, a dagger-sharp smile that cracks her lips. “You know they use soot for gold in fireworks? Plain lampblack. Gives the brightest color.”

Water closes over her head, hissing, steam making writhing snakes out of her hair. Meg is burning, fire in her insides, jamming in her blood. Tarry smoke fills the mouth of this girl, stolen from outside a bar somewhere in Los Angeles on a soft November night forever ago. The world looked bigger then, more meaningful.

 _You and I,_ Meg had promised the girl, threading black smoke through her mouth, up her spine, sliding into the mushroom whorls of her brain. This girl, from Cheboygan, MI, who wanted to make it big in Hollywood. This girl, whose bare white throat she marked with her then-teeth to get her to open up wide, for her then-mouth and tongue to explore before she weaved into her, gently, because this one had an empty vulnerability that made her safe as houses. _You and I. We’ve a long way to go. A part to play._

“White queen, black queen,” she hears Crowley say. “You know what it means. We just have to go deeper, drag it out from under all that filth. Enjoy your bath.”

Underwater. Dissolving, cracking open from the inside. In her eyes a conflagration of fireworks.

She’s dancing at Madame Padva’s, and the crowd of demons watching her fill her with awe. Meg’s not fully there yet. There’s no blacksmith forge where souls are battered to black smoke with fire and brimstone, no measure of the time it takes. Meg—and she’s not _Meg_ yet, either, she’s just _this_ , nameless little steam dancer at Madame Padva’s house of horrors—Meg snarls and spits when they screw metal to bone. She doesn’t have tears anymore, and she wonders when her eyes will fill up like that, like lampblack soot—

Up again. Steam. Screaming.

She’s pretty sure she’s got a few bleeders under this girl’s skin. The pressure is enough to pop arteries. A white-gloved hand reaches for her, holds her up by her hair. Through the steam and the oily tears running down her face she recognizes Viggo, Crowley’s little Doctor Steroids.

“Not you!” she groans.

“Get her out of there,” Crowley says. “This exercise is over.”

*~~*

Viggo talks. He talks and talks till Meg wants to put a finger through his eye and drag out his brainmeats, bit by mealy bit, let him mop it up with his cranberry bowtie. Viggo talks about Greyhounds and slushies, Obamacare and spacecraft, movies and Justin Beiber. Meg takes it that his only girlfriend is Google, and he must spend as much time as possible servicing her. It’s kind of a sad notion, but chicks don’t dig evil doctor types.

“So, hey, how bad is it?”

She’s interrupted him in the middle of a monologue about _Twilight._ “How bad is what?”

“This thing that Crowley’s worried about. Hearts everywhere. How bad is it? Bad enough to get hunters poking around?”

Viggo’s lips curl in a nasty smile.“Hoping your friends will show up? Those semi-functional sock-puppets and their pet angel?”

 _It wouldn’t be so bad, really,_ Meg thinks. _Any day now, guys._ She turns her head in the chair as he disappears behind her, a drill sputtering to life. It’s not for her. It’s something else Viggo does a lot: drill into brains. If brains had teeth, he’d be a brain dentist. Or whatever.

“Hey, I just want to know. Curiosity and all that. It’s not a crime.”

“Oh, it’s a massacre,” Viggo informs her. “Thirty-six demons dead. Not exorcised, _dead._ Hearts pinned on trees and put in boxes. Dead before they could escape. Must be some kind of magic. It’s from New England though, we know that much.”

 _New England._ Meg hasn’t been that side much. It’s something about the cold, and the rain. Nothing tangible again, but she’s stayed off that route, taken assignments elsewhere. She frowns as Crowley pushes through the door, grabbing for an apron on the wall-hook.

“Weren’t you blonde once?”

“My favorite meat-suit. Why?”

Crowley’s got a pack of hair dye. Meg gives him a scoured look, an alarm bell ringing somewhere inside her.

“Blonde’s really not my color now.”

“You think I give a rat’s ass?” Crowley grabs a bowl, and Viggo runs to fill it with water. “Someone in  Archives tells me you were blonde when you first bounced through the Gates. Let’s see if your memory goes that far.”

Meg laughs, amused. “Oh, you’re just girl enough to want to play hairdresser. Admit it, Crowley.”

Fast forward twenty minutes, and Meg’s not laughing though. Fucking color is _hideous_. Viggo’s eyebrows quiver as he holds up a mirror for her to see. Crowley shrugs the white plastic gloves off his hands and evaluates his work.

Meg makes a face. The dye smells pungent, like it’s a little more than just fresh out of the packet. Tears spring up in her eyes and run down her cheeks, and she laughs hard, so he doesn’t mistake it for her crying over the new blondeness or whatever.

She swallows and thinks she can taste dry roses, charcoal, vetiver. Weird.

“Did you learn this in Demon Psych 101?”

“No, it’s an ancient interrogative technique. From Uruk. Apparently, Lugalzagesi used it on workers embezzling from the ziggurats. Though, I’ll admit—that color is just as bad on you as I imagined it would be.”

“You _were_ just playing hairdresser.”

Crowley raises an eyebrow. “Oh, but don’t tell me you aren’t curious. I know how it works for the average garden-variety demon. You’re all just _yearning_ to know where you came from.”

“Not me.”

 And it’s true, really, she doesn’t give a damn. She’s here to flap her wings and help others set distant hurricanes in motion, to always live in the present, to always adapt to whatever’s happening right _now._ Meg’s not the sharpest tool in the toolbox but she’s sturdy, and she has an intelligence unhindered by impulse.

“Oh, humor me. I’m curious. How does Meg the human turn into—into _this?_ There’s one thing about you I like, love. You’re not boring. You’ve got a way of always saving your own hide, picking your sides just right and then disappearing when your fingers start getting sticky. You learn, you _adapt._ But you made a mistake, picking Sam and Dean Winchester and their stupid, insufferable angel. That’s not the winning side, Meg. You’re losing your, ah, your touch _._ ”

“When are you gonna get it?” Meg says, smirking, throwing hateful glances at her newly blonde hair in the mirror Viggo’s still holding up, “Those dumbasses _always_ win. Sure, they screw themselves over while doing it, but— semantics, you know. And anyway, what’s my choice here? I’m not going to bat for _you_. Even demons have standards.”

Crowley sneers, wrinkling his nostrils. “Do I need to stick you in a rumpy frock?  Because I will. Tell me what the hearts mean.”

Meg rolls her eyes.

“My name isn’t really Meg, you know,” she says. “She was just a meat-suit. Just like this one is, and the one before that, and I had Sam Winchester once too. They’re all just blips in time, just costumes. Demons don’t have memories or pasts. Demons have only hate, and lust, and violence.”

Demons are fragmentary, she doesn’t say. We look like smoke, but really, we are shards—she doesn’t say.

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong.”  Crowley says, and taps his temple. “It’s all right here. We’ve just gotta drill it out.” 

Behind her now, Viggo’s got the drill sputtering again. Meg tenses against her shackles, smiles a thin-lipped smile.

“Bring it on, frumpy.”

**Part Two**

_Beep._

Suntan lotion.

_Beep._

A bottle of KY.

_Beep._

Marshmallows.

Meg throws each item into a basket with unnecessary force. It’s early evening, and a headache is pounding at her temples. She takes in a shallow breath and lets it out, and a blonde curl of hair falls over her face when she leans to pick up a box of shaving cream she dropped. There’s a rumble of a car as it passes the Gas’n’Sip, and for a moment the sound seems familiar, and she raises her head to peer out of the glass windows.

Yeah, who the hell is she kidding. No one’s seen Sam and Dean Winchester for nearly a year. It’s like they’ve been blown away in the wind, like they’d never existed. Someone burned down Sucrocorp though, and Dick Roman’s definitely dead, so there was a point to _that_ whole exercise, she assumes.

She’s stopped looking around every corner for loopy angels in hospital pajamas.

“Miss?” the dowdy woman at the front of the line says. “Are you gonna bill that soon?”

Right. Meg _beeps_ more things past the red eye of the barcode reader. Look at her, being fucking respectable. Last month, Crowley disappeared while following the mystery of the hearts. Last month, Hell was in chaos over the absconding of their King. Last month, she sneaked out of Hell with a hole in her head where Viggo’s drill had gone. She can kind of still feel that hole, if she tries hard enough. Like a little door to her brain. _Pull open for Meg._

She’s not asking for trouble right now. A little R&R time, while she plans. What next. Where to go. Whose kettle to borrow and stir up trouble. She keeps looking over her shoulder, though, because who knows when Crowley will show up again. Honestly, it feels a little like she’s doggy paddling in the middle of the ocean, just waiting for the sharks to come bite. 

_Hi, I’m a demon, I’m bored. Tell me your master-plan._

“Miss.”

Meg drops the barcode reader on the counter. “Sorry, lady, my shift’s over.”

The woman gapes at her. “There’s, like, _one more item_ in my cart.”

Meg shrugs, like, _aw shucks_. The woman whips a credit card out of a fluffy purse and slams it on the counter. She has green eyes. Dark hair that could be nice, if it weren’t held up in a sparkly rhinestone barrette. Mouth painted vampire red. She would make a nice meat-suit, if Meg could fit her into leather pants. She imagines creeping out through the mouth of her current outfit, grabbing the woman close for a lingering kiss. She’d swim upstream and hang up curtains in her new home, and this one would crumple like a suit at the end of the day, blonde hair and all. Meg would use the woman’s red-vampire lips to say _aneurysm,_ with a pop at the end, just because _._

“Jesus, are you retarded or something? That’s it, right? You’re fucking retarded.”

Oh yeah, and she would keep this one screaming in her head for _days_. Get laid in the backseat of cars, smear lipstick and a jagged smile on bar restroom mirrors. Drink vodka-cranberries and nothing else for days, sit on curbs smoking like a cancer cannery. It’s a whole daydream alternate-universe, and it flits by in her mind, mercurial and cunning in its possibility.

Meg clenches her fists. Thinks this through. Her blood burns with slick desire.

“Gimme that!” the woman snarls, reaching for the scanner.

There’s a blackbird fluttering at the window. It pecks the glass, _dot-dash-dash-dot_ , and Meg beats the code with her fingernails. Draws an angel in the dust.

The woman leans tantalizingly close. Meg lets her grab the last item—tampons—and run it through the scanner. Meg could reach out right now, brain her quickly with the scanner, pull her in and stuff her up—wham, bam, thank you ma’am. She’ll leave the rest of the customers gaping, calling Yellow Pages for therapists even as they stumble out of the store.

The moment passes. With a death-glare, the lady slams money on the counter.

Meg does nothing.

It’s _stupid,_ unbelievably stupid, that she’s grown attached to this vessel. It’s not a pert, easy body. Smoking seizes up this girl’s lungs. Trains make her nostalgic. She has a sweet tooth, and Hershey’s makes her chubby. But there’s also layers of muscle memory, mostly when it comes to fighting. Girl’s some kind of champion. Or maybe it’s just yoga. Meg would have asked if she was still around, but she’s been gone for years.

“Meg, can we talk?”

 _Not really,_ Meg thinks, but turns to the manager with a grin.  Guy is a good guy. So what if he gets a little flustered around her at times? She flirts right back. The whole thing is a bit like the sitcoms she watches on Lifetime these days. Nauseatingly sweet.

“Depends on what kind of a talk you’ve got in mind.”

Guy waves her behind a wall of shelves. He looks concerned, and Meg wonders if she’s getting pink-slipped today. The thought fills her with a strange mixture of dread and delight.

“So—hey, it’s probably nothing but Melissa tells me you’ve been stealing…um, hair products.”

 _Dye,_ she almost corrects Guy. She’s tried every kind and color. Blue Moon and Pretty Flamingo and even Napalm Orange. It never stays, just washes away in colored streams down the drain. Circling, circling, a swirl of rainbow colors that all say the same thing: she’s cursed blonde. Her hair’s a cornfield in bloom, and this corn is everlastingly, eye-dazzlingly gold. Forgive her the terrible analogy.

“You—uh, you want to talk about it?”

About her traumatized past and the deep-seated psychological issues that lead her to hoard L’Oreal products? Fuck that noise.

“Not really, no.”

Guy fidgets. He really is adorable, in that awkward geek-boy way. He’s got blue eyes like her angel, and seems just as clueless about the world and human behavior, though he has a good idea of the cosmos and the ever-expanding universe. This one is all about black holes and event horizons, time-warps swung across space and time, the application of quantum theory. As per Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, though. Screw NASA.

“So, are you stealing them?”

Meg’s been stealing some of his books too. Ah, well.

She pretends to look chagrined. “Does my hair look any different from when I first walked in? Has it ever looked different?”

Guy takes a look at her hair and cringes. “Did someone have a vendetta against you or something?”

“Or something,” Meg snorts. “When I’m not here I wear a surgical cap to save the world from seeing it.”

Guy laughs. “Are you serious?”

“Serious as an aneurysm. Which, in case you don’t know, is very serious.”

Guy grins. Then he fidgets again, shuffles with a ring on his finger, sticks his hands in his pockets. She knows what’s coming next. Humans. So predictable. “So, I’ve been thinking—”

The light above Guy’s head flickers like trapped fireflies.

Meg stiffens, hearing the door open, the bell going _ting_ -a- _ling_. It doesn’t stop, even though the door’s open now. _Ting-_ a- _ling,_ _ting-_ a- _ling,_ and Meg presses one hand against the shell of her hear, the rushing silence a sea of foreboding. There’s suddenly pressure in her throat, blood humming fast in her body. The battery-acid burn of danger abrades her belly.

A low scream from outside, and she peeks through the shelves.

_What the hell?_

Guy makes a grunting noise. “Is that a blackbird? How did that get in?”

There it is, though. A blackbird. The same one as before too, she’ll be damned.

Melissa, the checkout girl at the other station, picks that minute to walk up to Meg with a box. “This just came for you.”

She knows what it is without even opening it, but then she does anyway.

A heart. A note, saying _white queen, black queen._

It’s not like she’s living in a hole in Yemen. She picks up news. She knows there’s trouble in Hell, she knows her kind are scattered, maddeningly lost across a spectrum of shifting loyalties and derailed purposes. Hell is traversing a slow moving conveyor belt towards absolute anarchy— their King gone and a serial killer on the loose. Some are helping the usurper just out of fear, while others remain fearful of losing their hearts and meat-suits any time. At any other time, Meg would be rolling naked in delight at all this, this nihilism, this toppling stack of cards that is supposed to be Crowley’s carefully constructed, compartmentalized, retro-fashioned Dante-esque Hell, but now—

“Leave me alone, Barlow.” Meg murmurs.

Consider Exhibits A and B, the only two customers left in the store.

One is a burly Italian in a porny silk-shirt. The other is an old lady in a muumuu. They both turn to Meg when she steps out from behind the shelves, eyes flitting black. They raise their arms in sync, like it’s some kind of Secret Group Special Handshake, and she sees the hearts carved there. Crude shape a death-seal.

Meg makes a face.

“Hold this for me, sweetheart,” Meg tells Guy. She dumps the box in his arms. She sighs at the strangled sound he makes when he peeks in and sees what’s there. There goes her chances with _him._

“All right,” Meg tells the demons, cracking her knuckles. “Which of you chuckle-heads wanna get their heads ripped out first?

*~~*

“What’s your problem, bird?”

Meg’s walking fast, feet thumping against gravel and sandy dirt roads, heading to the trailer park out at the edges of town. She swallows and tastes copper, drags a hand through her hair and sees pinkish liquid. She’s carrying the heart-box. There’s that guy at the trailer park who blasts gospel all night and brews meth all day—she’ll leave it on his doorstep.

“Did Crowley send you?”

This is possible, she guesses. It’s not like Meg has gone deep into hiding.

But the bird only caws and flies above her, occasionally swooping down to yank at a lock of her hair.

Meg thinks back to the store and the demons, the demons sent for her but not by Hell. She thinks of the muumuu woman bashing her head into a shelf and seeing stars and thinking _, now might be a good time to show up, Castiel,_ and hating herself for thinking that, and hating herself for thinking about thinking that, because by then the porny Italian was on top of her, and muumuu lady had her barcode scanner, and barcode scanners were quickly becoming every demon’s go-to weapon or something. But before she could get to Meg, the blackbird had started attacking her. Feathers flew. Light glinted off the blackbird’s one crimson eye, and blood splattered the floor where it pecked and tore into the muumuu woman. Meg had been so surprised, just not as long as the Italian, which gave her plenty of time to bite his arm, poke a finger into his eye, get to her feet and back in the fight.

It had been her and her blackbird, a transcendent bird-and-demon team.

She walks down the middle of the road, throwing wary glimpses at the weedy ditches on either side. A rusted bicycle marks the boundary of the trailer park, and Meg winds past the smells of food and brewing coffee, sweat and alcohol, the faint tang of rust and decay that hangs like a pall over this place at all times of day. There’s a wall of sound that warps to envelop her into its sphere. TVs attuned to a hundred different channels, conversations and music, a hammer somewhere, water running from taps and the sizzle of meat on pans.

 Over it all, the blackbird caws, flies in a circle, tugs at her hair. It makes an insulting noise and pecks gently at the back of her neck.

“Yeah, look,  I don’t speak bird. If you wanna insult me, I’m afraid you’re gonna have to learn English, or—,” she fumbles in her pockets, fits a key into the door of the seediest looking trailer in the lot, “or—Morse code or something. Now, go.”

Meg is nearly at the rented trailer’s door, closing it behind her, when the bird opens its mouth and squawks, “Hullo, darling.”

Meg’s heart hits the floor.

*~~*

Now, if you buy into all that Edgar Allen Poe crap about ravens and what not, you’d look at this bird and think _, jeez, that’s symbolic._ It’s got scratchy pentagram-shaped markings under its feathers and everything. It’s a pretty ragged bird, one-eyed and curmudgeonly, shifting impatiently from one foot to another, ruffling its feathers. Meg reaches out for it and it pecks her, quick and sharp, and blood wells from the midst of her palm and drips molasses-slow.

“You’re a fucking blackbird,” Meg says, or something equally brilliant and insightful. She’s sitting on the steps, repeating the same thing over and over again. It doesn’t get any less amusing. “I mean, seriously. Look at you.”

The bird looks offended. “Would you have preferred something fancier, cupcake? An egret, or a peacock? Oh, I know. How about an ostrich? I could give you rides—”

 _Should have been a cockney sparrow,_ Meg thinks. She asks, “Who?”

“Who what?”

“Who did this to you?”

“Barlow,” Crowley says, and Meg winces. The blackbird regards her intensely. It’s unsettling.

 “Hey, you’d know,” Meg quips, drawling her words. “Why’s a raven like a writing desk?”

“I’m not a raven. Anyway, both don’t survive going through a wood-chipper.”

“Wrong.”

“Meg, love,” the bird purrs, which should go down in the encyclopedia under the strangest things ever. “I need your help.”

“Oh, don’t make me laugh.”

The bird makes a _harrumphing_ sound, puffing up magnificently. Meg takes a deep breath, and then lets it out in a laugh.

“I really can’t help it. What happened to your meat-suit?”

“He has it. Your old buddy with the penchant for hearts.”

Meg makes a face. “And you seriously think I’m going to help you get it back.”

“Oh, I’m sure you will.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re crazy as a fruitcake. And because it’s the only way he’s going to stop hunting you down. I’m sure you’re finding the hearts tiresome too. If I were you, I’d take a flight to China. I hear the Jiangxi Province is nice this time of the year.”

“Hey,” Meg says, scowling. “I was doing fine till you came along and lit me up like a neon sign.”

Crowley totally looks like the cat that swallowed the canary, despite that fact that he is a bird. “You want me to go away, leave you to live out your miserable, filthy little roadside existence? Fine. Help me, and I’ll help you. Screw me over, and your lifespan will be less than a mayfly’s. Am I making myself clear?”

“You just don’t produce the same effect, bird-sized,” Meg says, lasciviously. “Why don’t you just go after some random demon protégé? I’m sure there’d be a million of them queuing up to get in the King’s favor. Unless, of course, you just don’t want them to see you helpless. Their mighty King, a scrawny bald blackbird.”

His feathers ruffled, Crowley hops once. “I’m not bald.”

“Have you seen yourself? I can get a mirror—”

“Please, no, thank you,” Crowley says, primly. “I am a narcissist. It might wound me.”

Meg snorts, rolling her eyes.

“And anyway, other demons don’t know Hiram Barlow. You do.”

That she does, Meg thinks, worrying a small hole on the knee of her pants. It’s not like she has any self-delusions. Meg has lived a stolid existence in Hell, staying safely in the shadow of the Big Name Demons. She doesn’t like it there much, though. Her tortures are plain and unimaginative even though she apprenticed under that psycho, Alistair, because it’s not a metaphysical blood-and-bone dimension beneath the ground that Meg wants to call home. Up here, the world in all its stupid, brain-melting complexity—love and desperation and an insane little march through life trying to conquer everything but ending up, really, with nothing—this is where she wants to be. It’s why she keeps finding missions that arch across decades. What does Meg care for the end-result? As long as she has reason to be up-side and she isn’t bored enough to start chewing on humans, it’s all hunky-dory for her. _Reason to wake up,_ as she tried to make the Winchesters understand.

But—Meg’s not going to pretend—for all the garden-variety-demon pretense she keeps, she knows Hiram Barlow. 

Intimately, you might want to add.

“In fact,” Crowley continues, “I’ve been keeping an eye out for him. I thought he’d show up when Lucifer was blaring his a capella, but he didn’t. _Now_ he shows up. Sends me pickled demon hearts. And _now_ is a bad time, because my emo-teen prophet is in the wind, he’s got the most valuable artifact in the universe in his grubby little hands, and there isn’t even any Winchester around to do the dirty work and get rid of him.”

“Also, you’re a blackbird.”

If Crowley weren’t a bird, he’d be waving his arms in frustration about now. As it is, one wing sticks out and flutters. “Yes, it’s a shame, now moving on…”

Meg stands up, dusting the knees of her pants. “I help you find Barlow, I’m free to go wherever I please. Is that a deal?”

The bird cocks its head.

“Deal.”

*~~*

Here’s what you need to know about Uncle Pip. In the demonic circles, he’s known to run a sort of transplanar pizzeria. Uncle Pip’s Pizza (We Also Serve Drinks!) exists in a kink between up-side and Hell, strange inter-dimensional web hooked across all fifty states and maybe all the way to Canada as well, and if you know where to look, it is easy enough to get into. No one ever goes to Uncle Pip’s Pizza to grab a pizza, though if you are so inclined, the joint will boast that the roaches that live under its floorboards and the termites that live in its walls had as much a place of honor in the _carte du jour_ as did pepperoni or cheese. The attached bar is frequented more often. Still, if the sagging blinds, broken shingles and flickering lopsided sign aren’t enough to annihilate your appetite, the clientele will do the trick.

Tonight, the radio in the corner is playing a mix of industrial clutter and sultry Goth. Meg sits at the bar with a glass of whiskey, nursing it as it sweats droplets onto the dark, grime-stained wood. Behind the bar, Jo Sorrow throws darts with an unassuming apathy at a punished old board. It’s a quiet night, with a group of men swearing and playing cards in the corner, Arlene washing glasses, Uncle Pip with his ledgers in the back room, and one of them eldritch-junk thieves bartering the price for a piece of some magical tektite with a demon in sunny yellow garb. It’s all that passes through a place like this: smugglers of the supernatural, demons looking for a quick fuck, the occasional ballsy hunter in search of information. And Meg. She’s been here an hour, striking up conversation, bribing demons into talking. Jo Sorrow will talk to her for dope, Arlene for kisses, but the more trustworthy purveyors of information accept darker payment.

“Holed out in Biloxi, is what I heard,” Sorrow says, pausing in his dart-throwing to wrap his sausage fingers around a dewy bottle. Meg watches him gulp down half the bottle in one wet, thick swallow, swiping the back of his hand across his mouth when he’s done. He smiles at her with crooked teeth. “You gone and got yourself in some hell kinda trouble. His little bitches are in and out of here at all times of day. Keeping an eye out.” He jerks his head slightly in the direction of an Asian girl in the corner, her tiny skirt accentuating slim, heavily tattooed legs.

Meg slides a packet of primo dope in his direction.“What does Barlow want? Don’t say _you,_ what is his big shiny master plan?”

Sorrow leans to whisper. “The throne, I hear. Big up-and-comer. There are rumors. That the King is missing. That it’s Barlow that calls the shots now.”  

Meg tilts her head slightly to look out the grimy window, to where there’s a blackbird perched unobtrusively on the sill. It pecks once at the glass in annoyance.

“He was always a megalomaniac,” Meg says, and rolls her eyes.

“Anyway. He’s got even demons scared. The heart is a sensitive thing, you know. Even for demons. It needs to stay where it should stay. Inside.” Sorrow rubs his chest. “What does he do with them hearts, anyway? People say he’s got a werewolf army.”

 “It’s symbolic,” Meg says. “He doesn’t really need them for anything. Are you sure he’s in Biloxi?”

Sorrow shrugs.

“New Orleans, I hear,” Arlene tells her, later, when Meg’s running her tongue over her teeth, scraping away the faint taste of cigars and clove she’d gleaned from Arlene’s mouth. “Sorrow’s probably told you Biloxi, but Sorrow’s been playing for Barlow’s team since the first heart was cut out.”

“It could be the other way around—,”Meg says, and peers at her intensely, this girl-demon all kite-frame skeleton and razor-sharp collarbones, a psychopomp’s smile stretching rubbery skin.

 Arlene runs her hand up the side of Meg’s leg, fingers trembling, nails chewed down to filthy little nubs. “Why would I lie?” she purrs, and Meg bares her teeth at her to cut out the bullshit. Arlene scowls. “Ask Uncle Pip if you don’t believe me.”

Meg does. Uncle Pip asks for a toe.

“Seriously?”

He smiles at her through wire-rimmed glasses, steepling his ink-stained fingers together. “It’s not like you have much use of it. And anyway, it’s just a meat-suit.”

Meg scowls and looks protectively down at her shoes.

Uncle Pip makes another note in his ledger as he waits for her decision. The room is soft and blurry, fire-hazed and wallpapered in a grapevine color, worn old furnishings and a pretty good imitation of an intricate Andrew Rackham painting on one wall. Uncle Pip is shrewd and weathered, reed-thin and beetle-eyed, his bearded smile creepier than the Mona Lisa and just as indecipherable. Everybody knows he’s a witch—but he’s also an immaculate businessman. He’s got a pretty good concept of bartering.

“Okay,” Meg says. “But just the one pinky.”

 There’s an odd feeling like a cold finger and a pinch on the side of her left leg, and then Meg’s left with a boot that feels strangely like it doesn’t quite fit right anymore. Uncle P walks over to her, a hungry gleam in his eye.

Meg makes a face, though her heart skips a beat. “You gonna kiss me?”

He curls a lip in distaste. “Please. I happen to know that you’ve been puckering up for angels. I just want to know what the King of Hell’s been up to, and something tells me you’ll know.”

In fairgrounds, she’s seen those Tilt-a-Whirl things. That’s the way it feels when Uncle P touches the top of her head, like she’s riding a Tilt-a-Whirl, only the central hub that holds the machine together is shaking on loose rivets and bolts, struggling to break free. Grayness curls at the edges of her vision and wraps searing tendrils around her, plucks her apart, blows her into thready black smoke. Eyeless, limbless, she floats— and the world is white around her. This must be the color of entropy, of uncertainty.

Demon lives are neither deterministic nor linear, more like a series of lightning bolts thrusting frenzied atoms into motion. Closed circuits of causes and effects that don’t seek to influence each other. And thus, when Uncle Pip roots through Meg and the metaphorical neurons that make her up, Meg is everywhere all at once.

In this chair at Uncle Pip’s.

At the supermarket, _beeping_ random products out the end of the line.

In Hell, in the chair, with Viggo’s drill rooting around in the trenches of her borrowed brain. 

 _I think it’s working, sir,_ Viggo says, enthusiastically.

Inside her head, behind eyelids that aren’t hers, images pool scarlet, flows beneath her skin, winds through the convolutions in the brain she’s hijacked.

 _Just relax,_ Uncle Pip says, in a bored voice.

“Screw you,” Meg says, and the tendrils grasp her tighter, squeezing her smaller and smaller, and in the chair, in Hell, Viggo’s face swims in and out of her vision and he says:

( _I think it’s working, sir.)_

—and Meg’s standing somewhere dark. The great gears of the apocalypse will shut down in an hour or two at a lonely cemetery in Kansas, but for now, the very atoms seem abuzz with dark anticipation. There’s a dark stretch of stinking corridor in front of her, with shafts of light falling through round holes in the sky. Golden light like in Bible storybooks _(sewer, she’s down in the sewer, and those are manholes, not the multiple eyes of a nameless God)_ and there’s a girl that touches her hand and says, “Come on, come on,” small shark teeth smiling. Meg wraps her fingers in the girl’s hand and they’re running, somewhere underneath a city, city beneath a city, labyrinth of pipe and tunnel and water mains and subway, life sizzling like forgotten neurons beneath diseased flesh, whole worlds interred beneath asphalt and concrete—

_(And going further back)_

Meg’s saying: _Clowns. All the nasties you’ve seen, all the blood and violence and the world’s biggest shitholes, and it’s fucking_ clowns _you’re afraid of?_

She’s not laughing at him, no. Regress too deep into the past and she’ll find that she hates them too, hates the whole dizzy violence of carnivals and crowds— but especially clowns, their smiles like they know too much, verisimilitudes, falsehoods. It’s very smart, being afraid of lies and falsifications. Sam Winchester is stupid smart. It’s different from being just smart. Just smart is less likely to get you killed.

 _Clowns,_ she snorts, bemused but not mocking, and lets him scream his violence at her, against her—and the light squeezes her again, thrusts her backwards in time—

_(Right, sir, this r.p.m seems to be working wonders!)_

—and this time Meg’s in Hell, again, only she hasn’t picked up the scalpel yet, she hasn’t even been to Madame Padva’s yet. Where she is now is a dark dungeon, luminescent rot growing on the walls, taut wires holding her off the floor.

Her crucifixion is matchless. Steel in her flesh— shoulders and breasts and arms and legs— bloodied stainless-steel fishhook barbs at the ends of the wires.

“You know,” Alistair says dreamily from below, head cocked to one side as he regards her. “Silly, isn’t it? If good deeds are mustard seeds, bad ones are the seeds of bubonic plague. You could amass one hundred thousand of the right kind, but one from the wrong box will be enough to burn the world down.”

Meg turns her head to look up at the place where the wires come together, the centre, the holding place of fire-scorched slats and shuddering rafters, and then she hears the sound of a drill, pulling her apart—

_(Ah, bingo.)_

Hiram Barlow is a baker before he is a demon and a baker after, a man in a Daimler-Benz carriage who seeks to take Exeter, Connecticut by force with the power of the cinnamon roll. In 1892, his carefully coiffed hair is so dark that it is almost purple, and something about him suggests a reptilian fluidity—he does not walk as much as slink, and to the backward, introverted agrarian populace of a town at the borders, he is the archetype of the modern worldly man from the Big City. 

In 1892, she’s living just off Sodom Trail, north of Sodom Brook and just past the old textile mill. She’s a plain, washed-out girl who reverently side-steps the cairns in the woods, and maybe that’s plain superstition, but it’s also probably in good sense. She doesn’t care, either way. She’s no one, but she dreams of a future that is fancy. Settling for normal and forgettable seems like giving up on the world and its wonders. In 1892, she kisses Lily Stachew and Roger Lynch, and likes it both. There’s an invincibility to her brought on by the age and a precocious certainty of herself.

 In 1892, Hallville and Sodom are wheezing through a bout of consumption, as are the richer homesteads on the eastern side of town. It’s not the ripe time for a fairytale existence, in any sense, but in 1892, the world seems big. The Civil War and the Long Depression is past, and it is into this climate that Barlow drives his insect-like vehicle.

In 1892, Exeter is in the grip of disease. Barlow’s renting the floor under the milliner’s in the main street, and everyone wants his pastries and stories. On the other side of town, Mercy Lena Brown dies suddenly, and the doctor calls it “galloping” tuberculosis. Almost a century since the Salem witch trials, superstition left in the dust of the wake of progression, but in March of the same year, the townspeople dig out Mercy Brown. Barlow’s at the head of the mob, spinning hysterical tales of vampire women that feed on living relatives. The party that marches to the grave of the accused is mostly all men: twenty villagers, the Brown family doctor, and a correspondent of the _Providence_ _Journal_ , but the blonde girl from Sodom watches them. She watches them exhume the corpse, Barlow’s impromptu autopsy, and the result that will infect the whole state with fear and panic.    

“There was blood in her heart,” the blonde girl tells Old Mr. Weeden. His farmhouse is not too far from the gristmill, and the sound from the mill has made him nearly deaf by now. She keeps him company sometimes because no one else does. “Imagine that. Been dead three months, and blood in her heart as if it pumped for her yesterday!”

Mr. Weeden purses his lips and regards his chessboard intently. He moves a pawn to the left and knocks down her knight. “Stalemate.”

“Hiram Barlow says she’s been feeding on Master Edwin Brown’s living tissue and blood,” she says, moving her black queen around the chessboard. It’s raining outside again, but the heat isn’t letting up.

“Don’t listen to Barlow, lass. Our Annie says he’s the Devil, and if he ain’t, he’s at least a lesser variety of demon. A church-less man, and he didn’t get that wealthy selling buns, I tell you. What, pray tell, did they do with poor Mercy?”

“Carved her heart out and burned it to ashes on a gravestone! Then they fed the ashes to Edwin.”

Mr. Weeden inhales sharply. Then, folding up his chess set, he says: “Peace be to that poor soul, and her distraught kin! And peace upon our town as well!”

Peace will not come to Exeter that quick. With summer fading away, Exeter turns colder and quieter, westward migration and climbing fatalities cutting down population. Barlow sells more than pastries and rolls now—a steady stream of people slipping covertly into his private offices at all times of the day, discussing disease and cure. Seven more graves are disinterred at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery alone. Barlow develops a cure from the carved-out hearts, sold only to the most desperate—something that actually, _miraculously_ works.

In 1893, Hiram Barlow owns the souls of most of Exeter.

_(Must have been Employee of the Year, down in Hell.)_

The blonde girl is a strategist. She’s also superstitious. She writes long, pointless journal entries about her dreams of a bigger world, places mustard seeds on the windowsill, and is afraid of clowns. She buries shoes by the fireplace, to catch the Devil if he tries to come down the chimney. There’s an iron horseshoe nailed to her door to ward off evil, a daisy-wheel carved into the wood to keep demons away.

Still, nothing stops Hiram Barlow when he comes knocking.

Summer’s down to its death throes. Out by the mill pond, the water wheel turns lackadaisically. Through her window, the world is a conflagration of oranges, pinks and reds. With the sway of the trees, sunlight plays hide and seek. She draws an allegory of the world as a giant pulsing heart, and shudders.

Even before Barlow’s sitting uninvited on her threadbare couch—his polished shoes and gold watch flashing winks of light on her face— she’s got it all figured out. Hiram Barlow can fulfill your wildest wishes. He can cure the worst of diseases. But he can also turn a man into something less than a man, get the most Puritanical of Exeter’s residents to carve open the chest of a corpse and feed its heart to an ailing consumption victim. He is at the head of every mob, voice like messianic thunder as he led the parade of the New England vampire panic. Mr. Weeden’s told her about Faust and Mephistopheles over their chess games; seen the play himself when he was overseas. The great doctor, tempted by the Devil, much like the town of Exeter and its people.  It is, in fact, the play that clued her in. And the copy of the _Connecticut Courant_ _and Weekly Intelligencer_ she found at the Weeden house. The one where a councilman from Willington warned citizens against a “quack doctor, a foreigner, a demon in a wealthy man’s carapace,” who breezed through New England towns. Invigorating others to disinter graves, like a plague that took only souls.

“All fools, the lot of them,” Barlow tells her, grinning ear to ear. “In three years, their deal will come due. The hounds will take them but I will take their hearts, sell the ashes again and bring more souls under my account. They will do anything to keep consumption at bay. It’s a vicious circle, an immaculate loop,” he pauses. “You see a lot more than you let on, and I like that. Exeter is small. Elsewhere there is progress and invention. Just on the other side of the border, New Haven boasts a telephone exchange. Have you ever even seen a telephone?”

She hasn’t, really. She has also not seen France’s tall gift to the United States on Bedloe Island, or Broadway melodramas, or anything beyond the borders of Exeter. In a tin box under her bed, though, she keeps pictures, scraps of maps, all the places she wants to visit, the things she wants to do. Torn from the almanac, old books and newspapers, that tin box has all the reasons why she’d sell her soul. And now Barlow sits, legs crossed and a disturbing smile on his face, and it’s like he crawls under her skin, rooting for all the deepest desires she’s been harboring.

He rises from his perch on her couch, his voice a low sibilant hiss as he backs her up against a wall.

“You want to be famous? You want to take a steamer to India, to China, follow the Silk Route and walk the streets of Istanbul? You want enough money to drown in and enough admirers to make a Queen jealous? Need only ask. And I know you will ask. You want it all, darling. Your soul’s the hungry sort, with teeth. Trust me, dearie. It’s a small price to pay.”

He tucks an errant strand of hair behind her ear. She holds her breath, contemplating. He’s flint, steel and char cloth to her tinder. His eyes flash, and she thinks this might be enough to light a spark in her, burn her inside out with the mere idea of getting exactly what she wants. Some times in the past days, she’s wondered if this is the height of stupidity, willingly taking on the role of Faust. The height of stupidity as well as the perils of wishing for things too far beyond your reach. But does it honestly matter? She will rather have life short and fancy than long and uneventful. She could not be content with mere contentment. Hope is her reason to wake up.

“Why are you so interested in me, Mr. Barlow?”

Barlow smiles. “I like a challenge, occasionally. These people, they’re too easy. I like playing games. I like winning.”

When they kiss, she thinks that one day she might forget Hiram Barlow, but she will never forget that kiss, or the way he tasted: vetiver, charcoal, dry roses.

 In later years the blonde girl will never return to Exeter. Broadway will know her, and her critics will wonder if she is as most of the brightest stars are in this world: burning out too quickly, aided by drugs or sex or death or all of it, fame a tightening noose around their necks. But she has talent, she is unstoppable, she is the girl who learns to converse in Arabic and Portuguese and Spanish, she is the girl who learns to mix lampblack and copper halides and cesium to get the brightest fireworks. Even as she burns bright, beneath the coronal dazzle is a core that waits for Hiram Barlow and his ten year deal to come due. When her dreams get intense and urgent, as if this dream-world existence is finally too much for her and all is collapsing inward, she knows that time is up.

And when Barlow shows up—because, of _course_ Barlow will show up, he is theatrical in that manner, and they had _negotiated_  a deal that required him to show up, she hadn’t signed up in desperation after all—he is driving a Benz Velo, he is still dark-haired and oily as greasepaint, and she is not in one of the million bright cities of the world. She is in the Noose Hill cemetery, abandoned for years now, standing quietly by a family crypt. No one ever comes here anymore. The detritus from tall trees is layered so thick, and last month’s rains have made it all to a sludgy brown mess that squelches under her feet. It hasn’t been disturbed once since the rain, and maybe not for a very long time before that.

“One game, like promised. If I win, the deal is off.”

He smiles wide, bowing once, sweeping off his ridiculous top-hat. “Only because I would so adore such a corruptible soul in my collection.”

He tells her about his ten years, about his rising rank among demons. How he is, truly, the Crossroads Champion. He might try Cranston next, see if the people there need their own vampire legends and heart-shaped cures.

“Like I told you, a vicious circle. Humans are just _so_ desperate.”

“Stalemate,” the blonde girl says, and looks up at the demon.

Barlow’s mouth falls open almost comically. Down on the chessboard, something Mr. Weeden passed on to her, there are only four pieces. The kings, of course. And then the white queen, the black queen.

You could play this game forever and never win.

“Black queen, white queen,” Barlow says. “No way to win and no way to lose.” He grins wide, raising an eyebrow. “Guess that means I don’t call the deal off.”

The blonde girl backs out of the crypt. Somewhere to the east there is howling, and she imagines a portal on the earth renting open, spitting forth the famed hounds of hell that Barlow keeps mentioning. She imagines their teeth and how it will smell to have your own guts ripped out. 

 “Nowhere to run, sweetness.”

He hasn’t moved from his perch on the marble slab. So sure of his win, so smug.  She looks to the side and thinks she sees red eyes among the trees, the trees themselves changing shape to become monstrous creatures. His face is a grotesque yellow-eyed twist, though when she blinks, he’s the handsome bastard he’s always been.

“I like playing games,” she rasps. “And even if I never win completely, I still don’t like to lose.”

And she slams the door to the crypt shut on the vision of his surprised face, fingernails tracing the Devil’s Trap carved on the iron surface.

*~~*

“And you were simple as that,” Uncle Pip says morosely. “For _fame_ and _money_ and _idolatry,_ just like every other idiot to ever walk the earth. For all you pretend to be just some common demon, Meg, I’ve always thought of you as sensible.”

“Maybe I got sensible _after_ I learned how to pick out your temporal lobe through your eyes. Want me to demonstrate?”

Uncle Pip makes a tutting noise. “Things never improve in Hell. You’re all always the same. All crassness, sound and fury.”

Meg still feels shaky, but at least the Tilt-a-Whirl feeling is gone. “Are you going to tell me where I can find Barlow, or do I need to—”

“Don’t threaten me. It’s boring. Find James Killner off I-295. He passed by here earlier, looking for you. If he couldn’t tell you where the usurper is, you’re totally on your own.”

Outside at the bar, the blackbird has somehow latched onto a drink so twirly and girly that her uterus twinges. Meg watches him as she barters a Devil’s Trap pendant off a thief, keeping it wrapped in a swathe of cotton as she slips it in her pocket.

“Are you coming, dickbag?” Meg says, and Crowley scrambles to pick up a cherry floating in the drink, holding it in his beak as he flies out behind her.

**NOW**

Under the halogen shine of the highway exit, Meg makes the demon in James Killner talk while her blackbird flies around being pretty damn useless.

“I didn’t know he wasn’t Crowley!” Killner keeps saying. “How could I know? He was using the same meat-suit!”

“Yeah, save the tears for later, okay, pal? We’re kind of on a timetable here,” the bird says, and pecks irately at Meg’s neck.

Meg frowns. “You know, in all the books I read, these kids make these real, transcendent bonds with their pets. Think Free Willy, Hachiko the Dog, Black Beauty—” she quips, wiping bloody fists on her sleeves. “You really can’t just possess some random guy? You’re seriously _stuck_ as a bird?”

“You think he shoved me out of my meat-suit and I went and possessed a blackbird? I can’t get back in me, till the thing in me gets out of me. Which sounds like the over-simplified plot of some emo Sundance porn movie, but crikey, you’re even more stupid than I could have imagined.”

Meg smiles sweetly. “Don’t hurt your tiny bird brain, imagining things. You,” she barks at Killner. “You’re coming with us. If he is, as you say, back in Exeter, I need someone to help me improvise. Since the bird’s fucking useless.”

“You’re like an annoying gnat I want to squish under my foot.”

“Well, you don’t have a foot. Boohoo. What are you going to do, poop on me?” Meg says, with no real heat. She looks at Killner’s car, rusted scrap-metal heap of an ugly-ass Cadillac, and frowns. Even if they find Barlow, what then?

 

*~~*

It’s two days before they roll into Exeter, and the town hasn’t changed much. Sodom Trail is still Sodom Trail, though they call it the Sodom and Hallville Historic District now. The Weeden house is still there, as is the Chestnut Hill Baptist church and Nooseneck Hill. The mill pond and factory lot in Sodom is as she remembered it, though the water wheel is in ruins, choked with weeds and falling apart, all rusted nails and bolts and splintered wood.

Meg throws a stone at the Lynch’s barn window for old times’ sake, for if the phantom of that long ago Roger Lynch wanted to come and make out with her again.

“Not the climate to go on a nostalgia trip, really,” Barlow says from somewhere behind her. “I imagined you would be cockier than before, but not stupid enough to just show up and take a nature walk. It’s really quite, ah, disappointing. Especially after the merry hide-and-seek game my people have been engaging you with.”

Meg snorts. “Oh, I’ve never been very wise. Still, locked you in a crypt for nearly a century, didn’t I?”

“A discommodious mess, but that’s all behind me. Look at me now, wearing the King of Hell. I’m finally taking what I should have had _years_ ago.”

Meg turns, smiling. “I dunno, I sort of miss the Cockney, you know? The King of Hell says you better not damage his merchandise, by the way. He’s especially attached to the family jewels.”

Barlow curls his lip in distaste. “I locked him inside a bird. Did he find you?”

“Tragically.”

“And he is waiting, just out of ear-shot, for me to make a move on you before he can offer to chivalrously help you by—flapping his wings?”

“Oh, he can do more than flap his wings. He’s _Crowley._ ”

Barlow pauses for a moment, staring into the trees and at the weathervane angel glinting on the top of the old cotton mill. It’s weird, seeing his sideways smirk on Crowley’s oddly affable face, and Meg wants to punch the lights out of him. She twists her own neck to scout for the bird, and doesn’t find him anywhere. Well, naturally. The bastard.

“So what happened with the other meat-suit? Bored of it after a century?”

Barlow taps a gold-edged cane on the ground. “Oh, no. I’ve grown attached, you see. I think of that face as _my_ face. This is, although it serves its purpose, quite temporary. I’ve been fooling quite a few of your kind that wouldn’t come over even under threats. They see this face; they think it’s their King. Really rather useful.”

“Convenience was always important to you. Why take one soul when you can take a whole town, right?”

“Not convenience. _Neatness._ It is why I need to destroy you as well. I don’t like blemishes, even when they are harmless. You’re like an itch I can’t scratch.”

“I’m sure,” Meg drawls.

“Do you want to see what I’ve made of my prison, love?” Barlow asks, and before she can open her mouth to say _didn’t quite get that,_ something hard is striking the back of her head. Colors flash in her vision, and she thinks _cesium for indigo, strontium for red, lampblack for gold._ Mortar-shell brightness in her eyes, and from far off, she can hear Barlow laugh, hear the scrape of her body as they drag her off to Nooseneck. _Fitting name_ , Meg thinks, not for the first time, and wonders if she’s imagining a blackbird cawing somewhere up there in the sky that flashes like short circuits.

*~~*

When she comes to, Meg’s in a cage.

And not just a fucking cage on the fucking ground, but one suspended above the ground with loops of cable running above and below and looping around trees. Below, she sees a vista of pinprick-graves, a whole meadow of them spanning out in every direction, dotted here and there with a crypt. Closer to her is the one she locked Barlow in. And as if cage-oriented theatrics weren’t enough, he’s also got demons impaled on giant hook-things. Overkill, really. Meg doesn’t have to look closer to see that they’re all missing their hearts.

Below, live demons stand watching. Some of them wear confused expressions, like they don’t have a clue what they’re doing or why Crowley’s behaving strangely. Others, the ones in the know, just look bored, like this is the same old production of _Nutcracker_ they’ve been dragged to since they first tried on their tiny little tutus.

“Hi,” Meg waves cheerfully at them. There’s a pale orange glow where Barlow’s lit these little red fires. Right. She didn’t really have to go to Broadway to see anything. Barlow puts on a pretty good show all by himself. “Is he going to wear a cape or something when she comes out? Because I might just projectile-vomit…”

The demons say nothing. They don’t even move. Okay. Creepy. And also, choreographed.

“How sweet, right?” Barlow says, stepping out of the crypt like a goddamned Christopher Lee wannabe. “We’ve been tailing her for months, and she shows up to rendezvous with us, herself! Meg, sweetness. You’re wondering about the cage. I’ve done my homework, and you really do seem to have this uncanny ability to be in the thick of things, but still escape unscathed when they go south. They tell me about Azazel, about Lucifer! The greats gone, but you’re still here? We can’t have you doing that today! So here you are, at the centre, off the ground so you can’t run. And I must assure you, I am _very glad_ you’re finally here. You, ah, what’s that phrase. Really _screwed_ _me over_ , the last time we met. I’m glad I finally get to settle my debts.”

Meg looks down, quizzically. “Are you done?”

“What?” Barlow asks, irritated.

“No. Seriously.  That’s all? That’s your big fucking monologue? It’s been a _hundred years._ What did you do with all that time?”

Barlow looks up, smiling indulgently, like she is a child throwing a tantrum about the truth of the moon-being-cheese analogy. “Seething,” he says, and brings out a pretty giant knife that has even Meg worried for a minute. Because she’s seen demon-killing knives. Had one for a while in fact, stolen off the Winchesters, until Sam Winchester tricked her into giving it back to him, but this is no motherfucking knife. This is a _meat cleaver._ Or a scimitar. Or something short of a samurai sword, whatever those funny Japanese chopsticks were called.

At this point she is just glad that it is not a chainsaw.

“You can’t get out of the cage, so don’t try.”

“Oh, no. I’m enjoying the show.”

“You’ve always been brave,” Barlow calls, craning his neck to see her face. “Suicidal. It’s your mortal flaw. But you’ve also always been rather observational. Recent chatter’s been all about this _tablet,_ you wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you? They say you’re possibly the only one who knows where Lucifer’s Crypts are. So maybe you know about the tablets too. I like to keep myself busy, Meg.”

Meg presses fingers against the bars of the cage. “Sorry to change the subject but, hey. What you’re saying is that I can’t get out of this cage if I tried, but you’re all free to blow out whenever you want, right?”

Barlow looks suspicious. “So?”

“I’m just wondering. You know. What will happen if I say _exorcizamus te—,_ ” her fingers clench on the bars, her throat closing off, but she coughs and rasps the words, “— _omnis immundus spiritus—”_

“What?” Barlow gasps, one hand rising to claw at his—Crowley’s—throat. “What’s she doing?”

One of the bored-looking demons in the know shrugs, opening her mouth wide in a scream as she decides she best not hang around. Meg catches Killner’s eye in the crowd of demons below her, and he nods before doing the same.

Meg swallows blood and bile and focuses on keeping herself in this body, no use being a dense black cloud in a confined space if she could keep her eyes and ears and boobs, “— _omnis satanica potestas—_ ”

She only gets that far before Barlow’s blowing out. Crowley’s meat-suit crumples to the floor, and with a weak laugh, Meg leans against the bars, spitting a mouthful of blood and thanking hunters met over the years for these words she thought she’d never use.

She knew Barlow wasn’t going to risk it. He didn’t spend a hundred years in lockdown just to be sent back to Hell by the same girl ( _thing)_ who locked him in.

“Never mind,” Barlow’s original voice calls out from inside the crypt. _So that’s where he’s been keeping it,_ Meg thinks, and is unsurprised. Barlow raises a hand and Meg can see the branding mark even from up here. “Not going to be shoved out unless I want to be.”

“Now I don’t want you to be,” she whispers, and it is at the same moment that a passing blackbird decides to drop a pendant around Barlow’s neck.

A moment later, the bird falls out of the sky, still streaming crimson smoke from its mouth. Meg watches as Crowley re-animates on the ground, stands up grimacing, and brushes crushed blades of grass off his suit. He makes a grumpy face and looks around at the gathered demons.

“Did you all miss Daddy?”

Then, with a flick of his fingers, he’s gone.

“Hey, precious,” Meg calls, and a confused Barlow looks up with the Devil’s Trap pendant around his neck. “Keeping me off the ground? Mistake.”

And that’s when the fake graves start exploding. The demons Killner had alerted escape almost immediately, but the rest are blown to bits. The force of the explosions rock the cage, rattles it to and fro like a pendulum, and Meg hunkers down in a bracing position, embers and earth and drops of fire raining on her like fireworks. One of the cables holding the cage up break off, and the cage sways dangerously. Meg holds onto the bars, eyes streaming from smoke and dust and flying sand, maybe even bits of bone and flesh, and prays that she doesn’t get blown to smithereens. Would be a damn shame, after engineering this freaky plan for Killner’s demons to place pyrotechnics under the earth.

Another cable gone, then another, and then the cage comes unmoored from one tree, listing heavily to the left as it falls to the ground. The impact nearly knocks her lower teeth into the roof of her jaw, and all of her insides seem to push up into her ribcage. She can hear bones crunch inside of her, and pain flashes black and white in front of her eyes. Pain is synesthete like that, and something even demons feel. The last of the fake graves explode with a shower of golden sparks and throws her out of the cage and out into the shrubs. Meg lands with a sickening thud that’s followed by the worst kind of pain imaginable.

Fucking awesome. The breath’s knocked out of her, and her lungs must be shreds in her chest, riddled through with the remnants of her ribs. She can’t even move.

Lying there, she watches the last of the gold sparks die. _Lampblack for soot,_ she thinks. And: _Crowley better come back of her._

*~~*

“We had a deal,” Meg wheezes in the back of Crowley’s silly black Russian Volga. As if he couldn’t find any other car. “I help you, I’m free. That was our deal.”

Crowley peers over the top of the front seat, eyebrows raised. “I ditch you, you die. So, new deal. We go back to Hell, I let you have your R&R time, and you tell me where Lucifer’s crypts are. Yes, I heard that.”

Meg smirks. “I could just find another meat-suit—”

“Logically, of course. But next time you run—and you _will_ run—back to Sam and Dean Winchester like the pathetic excuse to demons that you are, they won’t stop to listen before sticking that bloody knife in your heart. Those boys have grown out of exorcisms, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“You’re a bastard.”

“I’m an opportunist. There’s a difference.”

Meg bites her lip and tries to breathe. _Do you think he’s really dead?_ She wants to ask. She thinks he is. Almost as if reading her mind, Crowley dangles something small and silver from his fist, the chain swinging metronomic at her eye-level. Like a subject undergoing hypnosis, Meg follows the pendant with her eyes. There are specks of blood on it still. She blows a sigh and also tries to blow away a strand of hair that falls onto her face.

“Just out of curiosity,” Crowley smirks. “Did you have a stage name all those years ago? I happen to be an aficionado of that age in Broadway. All those smokes and mirrors and thinly garbed ladies—”

“Oh, fuck you.”

“My, my, civilized company just _brims_ all around me.”

Every inch of her body seems swept with a weariness the magnitude of which she couldn’t even really imagine. At the corners of her eyes were dreams, probably of stage lights and greasepaint, and she may as well sleep, she isn’t going anywhere by herself too soon.

“At least dye my hair dark again,” she says, making one last half-hearted attempt to blow at the errant strand.

Meg can hear the dark humor in Crowley’s voice as he tuts at her.

“Oh, come on, Meg. Blondes really do have more fun.”

END

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 


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